[Announce] Publishing of Virtuozzo 7 Technical Preview - Containers

[Sergey Bronnikov]

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the official release of Virtuozzo 7.0 Technical
Preview - Containers.

It has been more than a decade since we released Virtuozzo containers [0].
Back then Linux kernel lacked isolation technologies and we had to implement
those as a custom kernel patch. Since then we have worked closely with the
community to bring these technologies to upstream. Today they are a part of
most modern Linux kernels and this release is the first that will benefit
significantly from our joint efforts and the strong upstream foundation.

This is an early technology preview of Virtuozzo 7. We have made some good
progress, but this is just the beginning. Much more still needs to be done.
At this point we replaced the containers engine and made our tools work with
the new kernel technologies. We consider this beta a major milestone on the
road to the official Virtuozzo 7 release and want to share the progress with
our customers.

This Virtuozzo 7.0 Technical Preview offers the following significant
improvements:

* Virtuozzo 7 is based on RHEL7 and Kernel 3.10+
* Containers are using kernel features cgroups and namespaces that limit,
  account for, and isolate resource usage as isolated namespaces of a
  collection of processes. The beancounters interface remains in place for
  backward compatibility. At the same time it acts as a proxy for actual
  cgroups and namespaces implementation.
* UUID instead of VEID for container identification. You can now identify
  containers by their UUIDs or names. By default vzctl will treat the former
  VEID parameter as name.
* VCMM 4th generation of memory manager. We switched to memcg. By balancing and
  configuring memcg limits we will get the exact overcommit, shadow gangs,
  swap, page cache overuse Virtuozzo parameters. This will be done by a
  userspace daemon.

Known Issues
============

* Cannot boot Virtuozzo 7 TP - Containers with EFI. (#PSBM-34786)
* Autopartitioning for standard partitions in the Virtuozzo 7 Beta 1 installer
  does not work. For details, see the RHEL bug #1172441. (#PSBM-34787)
* Installation may stop due to an RHEL bug. In this case, restart installation.
  For details, see RHEL bug #1167948. (#PSBM-34797)
* netconsole cannot be used along with bridged containers. (#PSBM-34959)
* Container console does not work in OpenStack.
* SIMFS does not work.

The deprecated functionality as well as planned container functionality is
described in the Wiki [1].

Download
========

All binary components as well as installation ISO images are available for
everyone [2]. The source code of each component is available in the public
repository [3].

FAQ
===

Q: Can we use the binaries or Virtuozzo distribution in production?
A: No. Virtuozzo 7 is in the early beta stage and may contain serious bugs,
   so we strongly recommend against any production use. New features are in
   development.

Q: What about the future of vzctl?
A: vzctl will become obsolete in future versions of Virtuozzo. We recommend
   that you switch to prlctl that can manage both containers and virtual
   machines.

Q: Is it possible to upgrade OpenVZ stable to Virtuozzo 7?
A: Yes! You can migrate containers from OpenVZ to Virtuozzo using the
   script [4].

Feedback
========

Our switching to the open development process is an attempt to work more
closely with the OpenVZ community. You can help us by sending your feedback to
the users@ mail list [5] or submitting a bug in case of serious issues [6].

Links
=====

[0] http://openvz.org/History
[1] https://openvz.org/Virtuozzo_7_Technical_Preview_-_Containers
[2] https://download.openvz.org/virtuozzo/releases/7.0-beta1/x86_64/iso/
[3] https://src.openvz.org/projects/OVZ
[4] https://openvz.org/Upgrade_script_from_OpenVZ_to_Virtuozzo_7
[5] https://openvz.org/Mailing_lists
[6] https://bugzilla.openvz.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=OpenVZ

Regards,
	OpenVZ Team